A left-wing Pan-Americanism?

Critical notes on a declaration signed by the Broadbent Institute and some NDP MPs

Introduction

The Ottawa-based Broadbent Institute, which functions increasingly as a think-tank for the federal NDP leadership, was a major participant in the third Panamerican Congress. The Congress met in Montevideo, Uruguay in mid August. It was attended by representatives of left-wing parties from throughout the Western Hemisphere. A press release issued August 25 by the Canadian delegation states:

 The Panamerican Congress is the only permanent parliamentary forum where democratic and progressive forces from across the hemisphere come together to develop common positions on the shared challenges facing their people. The Canadian delegation to the 2026 Congress included Broadbent Institute Executive Director Jen Hassum, Director of Policy and Engagement Clement Nocos, MP Don Davies (Vancouver Kingsway), MP Leah Gazan (Winnipeg Centre), Chief of Staff to the Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada Savhanna Wilson, and NDP Principal Secretary Peyton Veitch. [Emphasis in original]

The Congress concluded with the adoption of the Montevideo Declaration, which calls for more equal dialogue between the Global North and Global South and the construction of broad coalitions and alternative mechanisms through which to defend a crumbling international order. The event took place at a bad moment for the regional left: in the year that passed since the last such conference, the Left has lost power in Bolivia, Honduras, Chile, and Colombia, while Venezuela – its President Maduro kidnapped by the United States – is now under US tutelage. Cuba, for decades the inspiration of the hemisphere’s progressive forces, faces economic collapse and imminent threat of US invasion.

In view of the prominence assigned to this event by the Broadbent Institute and some federal NDP leaders, I think North American socialists would benefit from consulting a critique of the Congress and its Declaration by a major left-wing Latin American website, the Red América Latina, published on August 27. The following is a translation of this critical text, which I believe was authored by Lautaro Rivara, an Argentine revolutionary socialist. The footnotes are mine. – Richard Fidler

 

A left-wing Pan-Americanism?

27/08/2026

Some critical notes on the Montevideo Declaration and the third Pan-American Congress that took place in Montevideo between August 21 and 23.

From August 21 to 23, the third Pan-American Congress was held in Montevideo, Uruguay, which brought together more than 150 officials, legislators and former presidents from 15 countries in the region. Among them only two Caribbean countries, with the notable absence of Cuba – as well as that of Venezuela and Nicaragua – but with the presence of parliamentary representatives from the United States and Canada.

Under the slogan “solidarity among peoples, sovereignty among nations” the participants shared numerous activities in the Legislative Palace of Montevideo and in the Mercosur Building. However, the large participation seems to contrast with the reduced political and social impact it had in the region, significantly less than that of its two previous editions, held respectively in Bogotá (2024) and Mexico City (2025).

We would like to share here some critical comments on the document resulting from the Congress, the so-called “Montevideo Declaration.” What follows are not the isolated shots of a lone sniper, but the appreciations of a militant convinced of the necessary unity of the left and organically committed to the ideology and integrationist project of Our America. I hope that these ideas will serve to stimulate a respectful and fraternal debate.

To begin with, it is necessary to clarify that the unionist doctrine of the independence leader Simón Bolívar, cited in the document, is called Bolivarianism or “Amphyctyonic”, due to the inspiration found in the ideology and organization of the old Hellenic amphictyonic leagues, known through figures such as Emeric Crucé, the Duke of Sully, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, and above all mediated in its Latin American reception by the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Our first intellectuals and integrationist leaders – such as Francisco de Miranda, José Cecilio del Valle or Bolívar himself – knew, adapted, realized and greatly enriched this tradition.[1]

“Pan-Americanism,” on the other hand, is a totally antagonistic and subsequent conception promoted by the hegemonism of the United States since the end of the nineteenth century, starting with figures such as former Secretary of State James Blaine, promoter of the First International Conference of American States in Washington D.C., in 1889. The idea of a subordinate customs union that we saw emerge strongly in the Free Trade Area of the Americas project has its distant roots in this original project. But it would be the early Cold War and the founding of the OAS [Organization of American States] in 1948 that would give political and institutional flesh to the so-called “inter-American system” under the tutelage of the great North American hegemon.

This is what any politician, intellectual, or citizen of Latin America and the Caribbean commonly understands by “Pan-Americanism.” For this reason, it is a serious mistake to refer to the historical integrationist project – Bolivarian, amphictyonic, Our American – in this way, even if it contemplates – as in fact it always did – the practice of international solidarity with the American people, its subordinate subjects, and its anti-imperialist organizations. From the time of the Civil War to the emergence of the civil rights movement, the peace movement, and Black Power in the 1950s and 1960s, there have always been close networks of collaboration and exchange in the political, cultural, and even military fields between the United States and Our America.

On the other hand, the “doctrine of domination” or “unilateral supremacy” that the document mentions several times so timidly and elusively is called “imperialism” and “neocolonialism.” That is what our independence patriots called it; this is how our most brilliant intellectuals studied it. From Simón Bolívar’s early warnings about the United States “destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom” to “the turbulent and brutal north” of which José Martí warned us, passing through the long and dizzying twentieth century until reaching our days, we have generated a very rich anti-colonial and anti-imperialist heritage and legacy; Why deny it, silence it or throw it overboard now?

As in any document, what is omitted is as important or more important than what is declared. Thus, the text refers, in the abstract and in the plural, to the problem of the “kidnappings of Heads of State.” We doubt that they refer to Manuel Noriega in 1989 or to the “extraction” of other extracontinental leaders, so we have to deduce that the document refers to nothing less than the kidnapping of the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros, in the early hours of January 3. The curious thing is why Maduro is, in the several pages of the statement, the only person who is not mentioned by name.[2]

It may seem like a detail, but this indirect and almost spectral allusion is not accidental, if we consider that many of the signatories of the declaration omitted and fail to make further statements about the extralegal and extraterritorial capture of the Venezuelan president. If as progressives or leftists we have to juggle so much to condemn the bombing of a sovereign country and the kidnapping of its Head of State, we are in the presence of a serious problem; we are faced with the manifest inability to draw “red lines” and to establish the lowest common denominators around our sovereignty and our national and regional self-determination, regardless of the economic or institutional model that the sector or process may promote.

One of the mentions that most caught our attention has to do with so-called “lawfare.” But contrary to what the declaration suggests, legal warfare mechanisms are not used either primarily or exclusively against “elected officials.” This is, in fact, a presumption and a typical error of those same “elected officials,” who fail to see the extent and depth of the phenomenon of lawfare, and its inscription in the more general modalities of hybrid war, neo-interventionism and new counterinsurgency doctrines.

Lawfare, as an instrument of criminalization, persecution, imprisonment and demoralization of political, social and geopolitical dissidence, also affects – and in general with little or no possibility of defense – trade unionists, social leaders, environmental, indigenous and Afro-descendant referents, as well as human rights defenders, journalists, students or intellectuals.

One of the most worrisome drifts of the document refers to the explicit replacement of peoples, nations and organizations by the “legislators who represent them,” which is symptomatic of the course followed by a good part of the Latin American, Caribbean and “hemispheric” meetings of recent years. From diverse, multitudinous and controversial conclaves – such as the São Paulo Forums in the 90s or the meetings of social movements in this century – to increasingly bureaucratized and restricted spaces for the socialization of progressive elites; expensive meetings without previous objectives, resulting goals, clear responsible, or subsequent follow-up, whose biggest footprint seems to be the carbon footprint of the guests’ planes.

This tacit conception, at the antipodes of the protagonist democracy that animated the progressive, integrationist and leftist cycle of recent decades, emulates – or rather imitates – the historical liberal positions, which consider that “the people do not deliberate or govern except through their representatives,” as summarized in the famous Article 22 of the Constitution of the Argentine Republic, the legatee of the original Magna Carta of 1853.

In line with the above, it is a gross mistake to consider that “democratic rights and freedoms” are those that have inspired and animated our last “centuries of struggle.” This liberal revisionism ignores the fact that nationalism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, unionism and social liberation have been the communicating vessels that connect the different cycles of continental struggle in the history of Our America.

We find similar errors if we move from the spectrum of political-institutional problems to that of economic-social ones. Thus, the declaration states that what is at stake is to seek a “sovereign and shared prosperity,” which seems to replace the anti-neoliberal critique and the post-neoliberal attempts – more or less radical, more or less successful – that defined the meaning and delimited the very subject of the progressive and leftist cycle. In fact, sovereignty and prosperity are completely antagonistic to a neoliberalism that in our region was unequal, exclusive, authoritarian and colonial from its very origins, “dripping blood and mud through every general strike” up to the coup d’état against the Popular Unity government in Chile, on September 11, 1973.

Within this rhetoric, which owes much to the Cepal technocracy[3] and to a kind of ambiguous and decaffeinated multipolarism – and which seems to have wiped the slate clean of Latin American and Caribbean theories of dependency – “productive integration” replaces economic integration and political unity in the region.

On the other hand, it is symptomatic that having met in the Pan-American Congress and having published this declaration in the very month of Fidel Castro’s centenary, his name has been cavalierly ignored. We could not blame it on a mere oversight, considering that there have been dozens – if not hundreds – of events throughout the region that have celebrated and valued the political and intellectual legacy of the historical leader of the Cuban Revolution.

We believe that this is not a fortuitous event, given that Castro was a bitter opponent of Pan-Americanism, even of its liberal and “progressive” variants, which he grimly had to confront, both in the times of the Alliance for Progress and amidst the sweeping triumph of the single-minded neoliberal thought that seduced so many former comrades who went over with bag and baggage in tow to the enemy camp.

In a nutshell, the Montevideo Declaration says little, errs a lot and concedes too much. But ideological and political retrenchment may not be the best strategy to confront the reactionary and imperial wave that is laying waste to Our America. But the program can only be explained by the subject. The fact that officials replace the people, the liberal-progressives the left, and Pan-Americanism our Americanism, is a result of conclaves that have become increasingly distant, selective, and palatial.

The simple fact that former Chilean President Gabriel Boric, who liquidated the social outburst and the constituent process and handed over his country to neo-Pinochetism on a silver platter, was an honoured guest at the meeting, speaks volumes about it. Instead of being accountable to his fellow citizens for the devastating consequences of his extreme-centrism, he is now allowed to lecture on radicalism in international conclaves, while he is shaping up for an unlikely new candidacy for La Moneda or – with much greater probability – to occupy some space as prestigious as it is harmless in the United Nations system.

To be fair, the criticisms that can be made of the Montevideo Declaration and the Third Pan-American Congress are common to many other spaces that we inhabit, and that have also been sclerosed or condemned to insignificance over the years. Revitalizing the project of Latin American and Caribbean union involves both recovering our historical emancipatory traditions – and not buying ideological trinkets from any liberal huckster – and reposing to ourselves concrete questions, but above all imposing precise militant tasks on us.

What does the Congress propose – and what do we propose – to prevent the imminent invasion of Cuba, to stop the genocide in Gaza, to confront the reactionary wave and its annihilatory fantasies or to put a stop to the greed of imperialism and the big digital corporations? The answer, no matter how necessary an international event may be, will not be found among the cold stones of a palace, but in the embers, still burning, of social and popular resistance, and in the atavistic memory of our internationalist practice.

 

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[1] The text recalls the legacy of the Amphictyonic Congress of 1826, held in Panama, which laid the foundation of the first dream of regional integration.

[2] Also ignored, as the text states later, was the name of Fidel Castro.

[3] CEPAL/ECLAC: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, a United Nations regional commission established in 1948 to establish economic cooperation.

Out of the impasse? The Avi Lewis campaign and left strategy

Introduction

The federal New Democratic Party will elect a new leader at the end of March. Five candidates are contesting the leadership, the principal ones being Heather McPherson, a sitting MP who offers essentially a continuation of the political orientation and policies the party has upheld in recent years, and Avi Lewis, who is offering a radical alternative that challenges many conventional party practices and policies.

The following article by two Toronto-based members of the party describes very well the opportunity open to the radical left to use the Lewis candidacy to engage with the NDP, and the challenges facing that left should Lewis become the party leader. It is republished, with permission, from The Midnight Sun.

-- Richard Fidler

* * *

Out of the impasse? The Avi Lewis campaign and left strategy

By Marcel Nelson and Nathan Rao

With the near collapse of Canada’s federal New Democratic Party (NDP) in the 2025 federal election, the Canadian electoral terrain is today dominated by a tug of war between two forces: a centre-right technocratic and authoritarian pole around Mark Carney’s Liberals, and a MAGA-adjacent hard right around Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives. This sometimes substantive, sometimes theatrical clash opens up space for far-right forces who draw inspiration from the advance of racist and fascist elements in the United States and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the American president continues to threaten to subjugate and even annex Canada – threats we shouldn’t understate. 

This is also a time of opportunity. To see that potential, one need only look to the global movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people, and to Zohran Mamdani’s successful mayoral campaign in New York City, a political breakthrough for the left. It’s in this context that, in the Canadian state, journalist and activist Avi Lewis’s campaign for the leadership of the NDP has attracted much attention, dedication, and debate. 

Lewis has won the support of many left organizers in part because he’s taken bold and promising policy positions on important questions. For example, he has argued for steps towards public ownership and democratic control in vital areas of the economy such as housing, food, telecoms, and banking. He has also laid out an ambitious vision for transforming our economy through a green transition that includes employment guarantees for workers exiting the destructive oil and gas industry. He has made the fight for Indigenous rights a central theme of his campaign – as well as the struggle for a free Palestine – and has been vocal about confronting the far right wherever it rears its head.

Yet the deeper value of Lewis’s campaign, beyond its policy statements, is its drive to transform the NDP and the way we conduct left-wing politics in this country. Lewis has been clear that his campaign’s core project is to build a powerful united movement to defeat the threats we face: to organize solidarity with grassroots protests and strikes, as well as to unite and mobilize support for left candidates at election time. His campaign has also been helpful insofar as it has provided an opportunity for serious debate about left strategy and organization – discussions that have not taken place in Canada on anything approaching a mass, country-wide scale in a very long time.  

 

Policy and strategy

Small, independent organizations of the activist left in Canada have served as an important training ground for activists and thinkers. Some of today’s trade union and social movement leaders have emerged from those spaces. So have a range of campaigners, commentators, and intellectuals. 

Yet the independent organizations in Canada to the left of the NDP have been at a strategic impasse for many years. This impasse stems, in part, from a rigid organizational culture and outlook within many of these groups, which may tend to overestimate the political possibilities of a given historical period. These groups are also sometimes unable to root themselves in actually existing struggles without losing their core commitment to developing revolutionary thinking and strategy. Some of these groups race to recruit new members, while others slip into a kind of political quietism, cultivating a self-image as guardians of left orthodoxy while waiting for a popular mass upsurge that never comes – or that appears for a moment, only to bypass these organizations completely before eventually dissipating.

There is an important place for Marxists and revolutionary socialists in the current political landscape in Canada, to be sure. But functioning as a loose network of like-minded activists is an inadequate response to the dangers and opportunities of the present moment. The Lewis campaign seems to us to be an opening in which we might break, or at least shake up, this impasse: a moment when the country’s small revolutionary left may connect with far bigger and broader forces. 

The NDP has never been a neutral strategic terrain. If Avi Lewis wins the NDP leadership, he will find himself at the helm of a party reshaped by major internal reforms made during the era of previous leader Jack Layton, which aimed to “professionalize” the party and weaken its links to organized labour. The result has been greater powers concentrated in the hands of the party leader and their immediate circle, further marginalizing the role of riding associations, active members, labour organizers, and other layers. This has exacerbated the party’s tendency to focus on parliamentary manoeuvering at the expense of other political priorities such as building and maintaining its grassroots base.

The NDP’s mix of full-time staffers and consultants have decades of experience with manipulating party procedures to exclude radical resolutions at conventions, and to prevent individuals with political positions they find undesirable from obtaining nominations at election time. The Ontario NDP drove out former Hamilton Centre MPP Sarah Jama for her Palestine solidarity, while the British Columbia NDP disqualified climate justice activist Anjali Appadurai’s leadership candidacy. The NDP’s history is littered with the cadavers of initiatives that sought to orient the party towards a more left-wing path, from the Waffle of the 1970s to the New Politics Initiative of the early 2000s, to the Leap Manifesto of the 2010s. 

Clearly the NDP is not an instrument that can be wielded with ease by Lewis or any left-wing project. Yet there is nothing metaphysical about the party’s tendency to disappoint or its success in crushing left-wing insurgencies within its ranks. Like any political party, the NDP is an institution riven by power struggles and beset by contradictions – a strategic terrain where opposing interests struggle for dominance, whether those interests find expression in provincial sections of the party, particular riding associations, or elements of the federal party bureaucracy. Some opponents of Lewis’s project might prefer to break up the party, and even join the Liberals, rather than cede ground. It is thus up to Lewis and allied forces to develop a strategy and a coalition capable of taking advantage of those contradictions. 

Contrary to the received wisdom one often encounters on the left, the marginalization of the left in the NDP is not entirely due to the party’s bureaucratic machinations. While those dynamics were, for example, certainly involved in delivering a severe blow to the socialist Waffle project at the federal party’s 1971 convention, the Waffle’s initiatives were defeated on the convention floor by votes cast by rank-and-file members. Backers of left-wing initiatives within the NDP cannot be satisfied with denouncing the party’s undemocratic practices, as these will inevitably arise. We must be able to anticipate and counter them.  

April’s devastating federal election result for the NDP dealt a severe blow to the consultants, pollsters, and strategists who have held the party’s reins for more than two decades. Not only did the near-complete collapse of the NDP’s vote undermine the legitimacy of the internal methods in place since Jack Layton was leader, but the resulting loss of official party status meant the leader’s office and the party’s research bureau also lost their funding. This situation has been compounded by the fact that the party is heavily indebted. Destabilized and in crisis, the federal NDP may today be more open to a socialist and democratic reorientation than it has been at any point in the last few decades, even if conservative forces within the party will certainly put up a fight.

Towards a strategy of engagement with the NDP 

In public forums and private conversations with organizers, Lewis has acknowledged all these realities. He appears to be alert to how his political project faces serious countervailing forces both within the NDP and beyond it, which will entice the project towards compromise and betrayal of the social movements with which it claims to stand. Accordingly, Lewis has mused about turning the NDP’s riding associations into activist hubs, with the aim of building the kind of popular mass networks that can both support his project and pressure it to stick to its declared agenda. He has speculated, alternatively, that building independent or quasi-independent organizations that operate both within and outside the NDP, like the Democratic Socialists of America in the US or Momentum in the UK, may be needed to create such networks and pressure. Lewis is well-versed in socialist political culture and likely keenly aware of the failures of past socialist initiatives in Canada and abroad: the lessons of the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn campaigns, as well as the experience of the left-wing Syriza government in Greece or the so-called Pink Tide left governments in Latin America.

At the same time, although the Lewis campaign has spoken frequently about the desirability of building these hubs and independent organizations, laying the groundwork for them has not been a campaign priority so far. Not unreasonably, the campaign has focused on signing up new members and rallying current ones – focused, that is, on winning the NDP leadership contest. While loose local campaign chapters have sprung up across the country, they don’t appear to have been centrally involved in shaping campaign strategy. The campaign recently published a high-level position on party renewal that expresses an intention to transform riding associations into activist hubs, but it remains to be seen whether Lewis will prioritize such an initiative if elected leader.

Time will tell whether this has been the most appropriate organizing model for winning the leadership race. It’s hard to say whether a more participatory approach would have gained traction, given the sporadic and uneven state of left politics in the country today. It’s also difficult to predict the Lewis campaign team’s plans for navigating the choppy waters that lie ahead, whatever the outcome of the leadership race, and how the call to build activist hubs across the country will be received if Lewis wins. At a public meeting we recently helped host, about building a relationship between the activist left and a potential Lewis-led NDP, the conversation’s tenor was generally positive, suggesting Lewis and his campaign may have opened the door to a more constructive relationship between the grassroots left in Canada and the NDP. Still, we came away from that meeting with a renewed sense of the enormous work, imagination, and goodwill needed to build the mechanisms that would allow those left forces to both support and hold to account a Lewis NDP. 

At the same time, it can be simplistic to assume there exists a neat dichotomy between more radical social movements and more moderate entities such as political parties. This dichotomy is well-worn: past initiatives to move the NDP to the left, such as the 2001 New Politics Initiative, assumed the renewal of the NDP necessitated bringing the party to the country’s social movements – a fetishization of social movements as a reservoir of radical politics and grassroots democracy that remains strong today. In reality, “social movements” in Canada are largely composed of trade unions, student unions, environmental and other issue-based campaigns, NGOs, and other organizations that are aligned with NDP priorities and operating within the same institutional networks, with personnel whose individual career trajectories often span multiple corners of that ecosystem. This can sometimes even place these movements and their leaderships politically to the right of the NDP, especially when it is not in government. We should acknowledge that social movements, especially where organized labour is involved in them, are beset by internal contradictions, including debates over their strategic and ideological orientations.

The NDP and social movements should be seen as intersecting terrains on which different strategies compete, each presenting both challenges and opportunities. Defeating the centrist forces that operate there won’t be accomplished by staying on the sidelines. The goal should instead be to coordinate an alternative left political project within and across both arenas – a coordination that would necessarily involve those who hold elected office as representatives of the NDP.  

 

Some provisional principles for engagement with the NDP 

Left debate is full of binaries such as electoral politics versus social movements and labour bureaucracy versus rank and file, where one of the coordinates is assumed to be more radical or more authentically socialist than the other. Yet these debates too often remain abstract. The radical potential of any political force needs to be tested in the realm of real politics and struggle, not labelled in a way that decides its nature and potential in advance. 

Two guiding principles could help. The first is to avoid investing any one individual or organization with the responsibility of being the standard-bearer for a left political project of transformation. No one individual or organization – not even a federal political party – would independently have the leverage to sustain such a project in the face of reactionary headwinds. Nor would any single individual or organization alone be able to resolve the profound contradictions that beset Canada as a multinational settler-colonial state. There must always be room for autonomous Indigenous and Québécois initiatives that may advocate for distinct projects of self-determination.

A second guiding principle is that we shouldn’t be afraid of, and should even seek to encourage, generative tensions in our political projects. Such tensions include the need to hold left-wing office-holders to account and also buttress them with support when needed. That dynamic could help those office-holders resist the opposing forces that will inevitably seek to neutralize any left political project. More broadly, it would allow for the development of a left ecology in which the NDP, social movements, and labour work out our contradictions in the course of real struggle, with the goal of building the left’s power.

Struggling to reshape the NDP would require taking over existing institutional mechanisms or creating new ones – transforming riding associations into activist hubs, for example. It could entail building or growing grassroots organizations that intervene within the NDP while remaining autonomous from it. We are agnostic about whether a Lewis-led NDP would be the main driving force in this network of intersecting initiatives, each with its own structure and activities. 

Ultimately, the left in Canada must ask itself whether it can afford to wait for a better opportunity to come along to meet our moment’s escalating crises. Is there capacity and will in this country to build a left-wing alternative to the NDP that can operate on the scale needed to meet those challenges in a timely manner? And can the left afford to leave the electoral field to the pollsters and strategists that have dominated the NDP for the last few decades – or worse, to the eternal, suffocating showdown between the center-right Liberals and the hard-right Conservatives? 

In the short to medium term, it seems as though there is no popular basis in Canada for a mass left-wing, country-wide force entirely outside the NDP. The longstanding impasse and small-group character of organizations to the left of the NDP in this country illustrates this clearly. Engaging with the NDP through the Avi Lewis leadership campaign, in part to seed activist hubs and other fresh organizations, could be read as an attempt at a shortcut – a gamble that imperfect means can help us leap beyond the left’s impasse. But we believe the gamble is worthwhile, because of how much all our struggles, movements, and organizations stand to benefit from such a leap.

Marcel Nelson teaches politics in the Ontario college sector.

Nathan Rao is a Toronto-based interpreter and translator.

Russia’s full-scale onslaught of Ukraine enters its 5th year

 

Statements from the Ukraine Solidarity Network US and from Ukraine’s left-wing Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement)

Ukraine Still Stands

As Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine enters its fifth year on February 24, the Ukraine Solidarity Network (US) calls on progressive and peace-minded people to renew their moral, political, and material support for the people of Ukraine in their resistance to Russia’s invasion and their rights to self-defense and self-determination.

Ukraine Solidarity Network US
24/02/2026

We must remember Ukraine even as we struggle against so many other outrages that rightly demand our attention: the US-backed genocide in Gaza, US military strikes on Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, and small civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants, health, the environment, and social and democratic rights.

Massive Casualties

Russia’s war of aggression has been as deadly as any war in the world over the last four years. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022, battlefield casualties (killed, wounded, missing) reached an estimated 1.8 million by the end of 2025, including 1.2 million Russians and 600,000 Ukrainians. The battlefield death toll alone is estimated at around 460,000 combatants – 325,000 Russians and 140,000 Ukrainians.

In addition to battlefield casualties, civilian casualties in Ukraine have reached over 53,000, including over 14,500 killed. The civilian death rate in Ukraine rose 31% in 2025 as Russia escalated its terrorist tactics of targeting civilian homes and energy infrastructure far from frontline battlefields with missile and drone strikes.

Russia’s constant offensives on the frontlines have been sending Russian soldiers to their deaths at a rate of 1,000 or more a day for the last two years. At around 30,000 per month, twice as many Russian soldiers are dying in Ukraine every month as the nearly 15,000 who died in all of Russia’s 10-year war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The horrors in Ukraine join the horrors of other wars and associated hunger and disease ravaging our planet over the last four years in Palestine, Sudan, Myanmar, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. People struggling for peace and democracy in all of these countries deserve our active solidarity.

A Stalemated War

Contrary to the Kremlin narrative of inevitable Russian victory, Ukraine has fought Russia to a standstill. In the first year of the war in 2022, Ukraine recovered nearly half of the land that Russia occupied in its initial offensive, pushing Russia out of the northern regions of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and most of Kharkiv and much of Kherson in the south. Since then, the frontlines have been largely frozen. Despite enormous losses of personnel and materiel, Russia has gained only 1.5% of Ukrainian territory in the last three years. 

Russia’s rulers are afflicting their people with an endless war not of their own choosing. Russia has now been attacking Ukraine longer than it took the Soviet Union to push Hitler’s Nazi army back to Berlin in World War II. 

Russia’s war finances are in trouble. Oil and gas revenues, 30% to 50% of Russian state revenues over the last decade, dropped by nearly 50% in 2025 to a five-year low. Ukrainian “kinetic sanctions” have hit Russian oil refineries, ports, and tankers, and have combined with declining global oil prices and western sanctions to begin to defund Russia’s war machine. Russia’s 2025 military budget was 40% of its national budget, which means that stronger sanctions might cripple Russia’s military.

Unspeakable War Crimes

The war crimes committed by Russia are unspeakable. In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Llova-Belova, for the war crime of abducting tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia for Russified and militarized education. The ICC has issued further arrest warrants for four top Russian military commanders for the war crime of bombing civilians. Russian air strike terrorism on civilian homes and energy infrastructure in Ukraine has increased since these ICC arrest warrants were issued. 

In an ominous escalation, Russian has been striking substations that feed power into the cooling systems of nuclear power stations since November and most recently earlier this February, risking a deadly Chornobyl-scale meltdown and radiation release. 

Russia is training its drone operators on “human safaris” that target Ukrainian civilians in Kherson. One in twenty people remaining in the city of Kherson were a casualty of Russian drones in 2025.

In the occupied territories, Ukrainians are subjected to political repression and forced Russification. If they refuse to take Russian passports, they are denied access to public services and banking. Children are often taken from parents who want to remain Ukrainian and their homes and property are being confiscated. Many are subject to detention and interrogation, forced conscription into Russia’s army, torture, sexual violence, and/or summary execution.

The Trump-Putin Alliance

The Trump administration policy has allied with Russia against Ukraine in its actions and negotiation posture. Since the Trump administration came into office, military aid to Ukraine has been cut by 99%. It cut all humanitarian aid to Ukraine shortly after taking office for education, healthcare, shelter, heat and power, war-displaced persons, HIV drugs, mental health services for war-distressed children, families, and veterans, and other services. In December, the US restored a token $2 billion of the former $63 billion USAID budget for humanitarian aid programs that is now being spent through UN programs trying to aid Ukraine and other war-torn countries like Palestine, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Also immediately upon taking office, the Trump administration closed US Justice Department programs to monitor and enforce sanctions against Russian frozen assets, influence operations in the US, and other sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Trump defunded US programs to document Russian war crimes, including cooperation with the International Center for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression Against Ukraine and the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which had identified and documented some 35,000 Ukrainian children forcibly abducted by Russia.

After repeatedly voting for UN General Assembly resolutions since Russia’s full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022 that affirmed Ukraine’s sovereignty and demanded that Russia halt its military operations and withdraw back to Russia, in February 2025, the US reversed course under the Trump administration on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine. The US, and its satellites including Israel, voted with Russia against a similar resolution condemning Russia’s invasion and demanding that Russian troops withdraw.

While Trump still allows Europeans to buy weapons they can send on to Ukraine, US shipment delays have left crucial Ukrainian air defense missile launchers without missiles to fire against incoming Russian missiles in recent weeks.

Trump’s alliance with Putin is rooted in their far-right ideological affinity for a world of imperial spheres of influence, authoritarian rule, and racist, misogynistic, and homophobic “traditional values.” Grifters on both sides have been bargaining to partition Ukraine between them like a piece of real estate. The Russian side has been led by Kirill Dmitriev, a Stanford and Harvard trained veteran of McKinsey and Goldman Sachs who runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and 15 years ago scammed purchasers of apartments in a building development in Kyiv out of their investments. On the US side are Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, all long engaged in money laundering the real estate investments of Russian oligarchs and other Russia business ties. 

Russia is now pitching Trump’s team on a $14 trillion business deal that is contingent on the US forcing Ukraine to accept Russia’s negotiation demands. It would involve lifting Western sanctions on Russia, joint arctic oil and gas exploitation, Russia returning to the dollar-based payments system, preferential US access to the Russian market, compensation for US corporate assets lost in Russia during the war, US aid for Russian aircraft modernization, joint mining of lithium, copper, nickel, and platinum, and cooperation on nuclear power plants to power AI data centers. All of this scheming is being conducted behind the backs of the Ukrainians.

Negotiations on the DimWit Plan

In the Trump-sponsored negotiations, the US has pressured Ukraine to capitulate to Russia under what has been dubbed the DimWit Plan (after Russian negotiator Dmitriev and US negotiator Witkoff). Russia demands that Ukraine cede occupied land in Crimea, plus land Russia does not control in partially-occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson provinces. Furthermore, Russia demands deep cuts in Ukraine’s military, no international security guarantees for Ukraine, and snap elections in hopes of seating a new Ukrainian government that will become a Russian vassal. 

President Zelensky has indicated a reluctant willingness to compromise on a ceasefire and freeze at the current frontlines and forgo joining NATO – but if and only if Ukraine receives credible international security guarantees against further Russian aggression. The Ukrainian public seems to agree. 

Despite Ukraine’s openness to compromise and Russia’s intransigence, President Trump repeatedly says Putin wants peace and Zelensky is the obstacle. Trump’s year of negotiations has been the deadliest year yet in the war for both Ukrainian civilians and Russia’s predominantly poor and ethnic minority soldiers.

Campist Contradictions

The Trump-Putin alliance puts to rest the false proxy war narrative of those campist geopoliticians and privileged pacifists on the Western left who are far away from the Russian assault troops, missiles, and drones raining down terror on Ukraine. 

The campists have claimed that Ukraine is merely a proxy force fighting Russia on behalf of Western imperialism as if the Ukrainians do not have their own reasons to fight for their right to exist. The proxy war claim was always a canard. With Trump now aligning the US with Putin, the narrative collapses on its own contractions. It is more absurd than ever. 

As Artem Chapeye, the Ukrainian writer, progressive activist, and now soldier explained to an American audience last August, “If this is a proxy war between Russia and US, why are the Ukrainians still fighting after the Trump-Putin alliance?” 

Ukrainian Self-Determination

The Ukraine Solidarity Network totally supports the Ukrainian struggle for self-defense, security, and self-determination – as do most American people by a strong two to one margin in recent polling. It is up to the Ukrainians to democratically decide what is an acceptable peace. We will not stand by while Russian and American oligarchs try to sell out Ukraine and divide it between them for their own profits and far-right ideological objectives.

We will continue our material aid and public education in coordination with trade unions and progressive organizations in Ukraine.

We will continue to work with progressive Ukrainians and Russians and support their demands:

·         Full and complete withdrawal of Russian troops from all of Ukraine.

·         International support for the armed and unarmed resistance of Ukrainians against the Russian invasion. 

·         International economic sanctions against Russia’s war machinery, including its political, military, and economic elite, its access to the international financial system, its imports of weapons-related technology, and its exports of fossil fuels that fund and fuel Russia’s war machine.* 

·         Return to Ukraine of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children forcibly transferred to Russia and Belarus. 

·         Freedom for the tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied territories incarcerated for opposition to the occupation and resistance to genocidal Russification.

·         Freedom for all Russians incarcerated for war resistance and political dissent.

·         Asylum in countries abroad for Ukrainians, Russians, Belorussians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans, and all people seeking refuge from political repression and war. 

·         No amnesty for Russian war criminals. 

·         Cancellation of Ukraine’s foreign debts. 

·         Confiscation of Russian assets abroad to be used to support Ukraine’s military self-defense, social services, and post-war reconstruction. 

·         Reparations from Russia to help fund a full post-war reconstruction of Ukraine.

·         An end to the Western imperialist policy of imposing a neoliberal program of privatization, deregulation, debt dependence, exploitative mineral extraction, and cuts to public services and labor rights on Ukraine today and for its post-war reconstruction.

* The question of sanctions is complicated and controversial among activists committed to Ukraine’s struggle. It’s especially important in the US that we do not accept the predatory politics of the imperialist US state. The Ukraine Solidarity Network will be discussing these issues with our Ukrainian comrades whose lives and national freedom are on the line.

 * * * 

How can Ukraine survive, after leading a large-scale resistance for four years?

Sotsialnyi Rukh, February 24, 2026

For twelve years, Ukraine has been fighting for its independence against imperial aggression. For most of this period, the conflict has been in a hybrid form, and exactly four years ago it took on the appearance of an open war, unleashed by the Russian army shelling almost all Ukrainian border towns and launching hundreds of missiles at military and civilian infrastructure. Ukraine has chosen a difficult path to defend its freedom, which it is pursuing.

Over the years, it has become clear that this is neither a “conflict” nor a “misunderstanding,” but a targeted war of aggression aimed at destroying the Ukrainian state and establishing a puppet government. The Ukrainian army has been able to stop Putin’s blitzkrieg and prove its ability to resist the imperialist invasion. Behind this success lies the exploit of the working masses, who have often felt marginalized in their own countries, but who have in reality become the pillar of the army. At the same time, we owe our survival to the help of people from all over the world, who have made us aware of the extraordinary power of solidarity.

The present state of the war is determined by its prolonged and exhausting nature. Russia is waging a war of extermination, systematically committing war crimes: torture, deportations, abduction of children, targeted bombing of residential areas, hospitals, schools, energy infrastructure and transport. These are not side effects, but a deliberate strategy of terror, as the Russian army is unable to defeat the Armed Forces of Ukraine on the battlefield. Despite extreme fatigue and a lack of manpower, Ukrainian soldiers are repelling the occupiers’ offensive and, in places, counterattacking. But the invaders’ approach to cities like Zaporizhzhia can only be worrying. Unfortunately, the Kremlin still has far superior long-range strike capabilities, which it uses constantly.

At the same time, the war has profoundly affected the social sphere and civil society. The severe shortage of housing and decent jobs is accompanied by ineffective social protection. Millions of people, especially in frontline regions, suffer from inequality and social precariousness. Awareness of the profound shortcomings of the state’s social policy has sparked a surge of solidarity: solidarity initiatives have emerged, trade unions have mobilised and other social movements have taken on a significant part of the support for society. The energy of the mobilizations is focused not only on humanitarian aid, but also on conflicts with a strong social dimension that reveal the failures of the system.

In our quest for a quick victory for Ukraine, we take a critical look at the liberal market policies pursued by the ruling elite. The desire to immediately maximize corporate profits harms Ukraine’s strategic interests, which demand modernizing its industry, ensuring full employment and uniting society. Encouraging imports, deregulation and the free movement of capital will not build a sustainable economic system that can give an advantage over the occupiers.

The enemy has been and will be cruel, but the greatest risk for Ukraine is to renounce justice, as this will breed discord and despair. Peripheral capitalism, mired in corruption, produces injustice on a large scale. It allows selfishness to flourish and businesses to grow, but it does not create any common protection for all. Imposing controversial reforms like Ukraine’s new labor code will amplify the scale of social inequality, but will not bring stability.

We aspire to unity, but we refuse to condone the mistakes of the authorities. This is where our spirit of freedom and our difference with Russia are manifested. Ukrainian society has not disappeared in the face of the prevailing anxiety; It continues to act and defend democracy and its independence.

Ukraine is not only fighting for its territory, but also for the right to be a space of freedom, diversity and confrontation of ideas, and not an authoritarian dictatorship. People of diverse opinions, including representatives of the left-wing movement, participated in this fight. Among the dead are artist David Chychkan, anarchist Dmytro Petro, anarchist Lana “Sati” Chornohorska, Yevheniy Osievskyi, and many other heroes and heroines of the Ukrainian and international anti-authoritarian movement. The Sotsialnyi Rukh is also not indifferent to our history: some of us have been serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine since the first days of the invasion, and every year more and more of our activists join it. Being part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine means being close to the people, whose social liberation we are working for.

At the international level, this conflict has long since transcended national borders and does not concern us alone. Around the world, reactions to the events in Ukraine are distinguishing between progressive and internationalist movements and anti-democratic and isolationist movements. Because it is above all a question of protecting universal values, namely the right to individual freedom.

If Ukraine is forced to capitulate or is defeated, it will not mean peace, but the legitimization of a forced change of borders. This will pave the way for further aggression and bring the world closer to a world war that could claim billions of lives across the globe.

We have no confidence in individuals like Donald Trump, who flout international law. That is why we see his peace initiatives first and foremost as an attempt to abandon Ukraine to its fate. The time has come to restore the balance of power in Ukraine’s favour, by demanding that Western countries hand over their military arsenals and impose sanctions on Russia.

The Kremlin will not stop its violence against the Ukrainian people until it has suffered a significant defeat. It is the duty of humanists around the world to help Ukraine complete what it has started and defeat the invader.

Ukrainian workers have paid too high a price to return to the same social injustice in post-war Ukraine that prevailed before. It is not the oligarchs, nor their neoliberal politicians in their pay, nor the economic elites, but the workers who have taken up arms to defend Ukraine. For these people, the state must serve their interests!

Glory to the hard-working and steadfast Ukrainian people, to their defenders!

Glory to international solidarity against imperialism!

Eternal glory to our brothers and sisters who died at the hands of Russian forces!